Get started with Tinybird

Tinybird gives you the tooling and infrastructure you need to ship analytics features in your application:

  • An OLAP database
  • An API gateway
  • A real-time ingestion system
  • An auth system
  • Tooling to build, iterate, and deploy data projects

See Core concepts for an overview of Tinybird.

Follow these steps to install Tinybird Local and deploy your first data project to Tinybird Cloud.

Before you begin

To get started, you need the following:

This is an experimental version of Tinybird. Join #forward in our Slack community to share your feedback.

Quick start

1

Install and authenticate

To install the Tinybird CLI, run the following command:

curl -LsSf https://tbrd.co/fwd | sh

Then, authenticate with your Tinybird account using tb login:

# Opens a browser window so that you can authenticate
tb login

In the browser, create a new workspace or select an existing one.

GCP europe-west2 is currently the only region supported.

2

Run Tinybird Local

After you've authenticated, run tb local start to start the Tinybird Local container.

# Start the container
tb local start

See Local container for more information on the container.

3

Create a project

Pass an LLM prompt using the --prompt flag to generate a customized starter project. For example:

tb create --prompt "I am developing the insights page for my app. I am tracking their usage and \
want to show them a line chart and a widget with the total amount of actions they did with time \
range filters. It is a multitenant app, so organization id is a required param for all endpoints"

The previous prompt creates a project with a structure like the following:

.
├── copies
├── datasources
│   └── user_actions.datasource
├── endpoints
│   ├── user_action_insights_line_chart.pipe
│   └── user_action_insights_widget.pipe
├── fixtures
├── materializations
├── sinks
└── tests
4

Generate test data

Generate some test data by running tb mock with the name of the data source you want to test. For example:

tb mock user_actions

This creates fixture data in the fixtures directory that you can use to test your project.

5

Build your project

Run tb dev to build your project and watch for changes. Building your project ensures that your datafiles are valid and are ready for deployment.

tb dev

When you finish developing, you can exit the tb dev session.

6

Deploy to Tinybird Cloud

Deploying a project validates and pushes the data project to your local or cloud environment.

To deploy to Tinybird Cloud, create a deployment using the --cloud flag. This prepares all the resources in the cloud environment.

# Prepares all resources in Tinybird Cloud
tb --cloud deploy

You can now access your new project in Tinybird Cloud. To view your deployment, go to Deployments.

You can also deploy to Tinybird Local by running tb deploy without the --cloud flag.

Next steps

  • Familiarize yourself with Tinybird concepts. See Core concepts.
  • Learn about datafiles, like .datasource and .pipe files. See Datafiles.
  • Get data into Tinybird from a variety of sources. See Get data in.
  • Browse the Tinybird CLI commands reference. See Commands reference.
Updated